Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Richard Nixon: Victim of Religious Prejudice and Religious Pluralism

Chris Beneke

The
morning after his loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential
balloting, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon was awakened by vigorous
tugging on his arm. No doubt groggy after two hours of
election-shortened sleep, Nixon found his twelve-year-old daughter Julie
next to him. She had been concerned by the previous evening’s returns
and wanted to know the final outcome. Hearing the bad news, Julie then
posed what her father described as a “strange and disturbing question.”
“Daddy,” she asked, “why did people vote against you because of
religion?” As Nixon recalled in his 1962 political biography Six Crises,
he assured his daughter that people didn’t choose candidates because
they “happen to be Jews or Catholics.” Instead, they chose them based on
their estimation of the individual candidate’s merits.

This
was an inspiring vision of political decision-making that didn’t
comport with much else that Nixon wrote about religion and the 1960
election, nor much else in Nixon’s general approach to politics. Never
one to underestimate the forces aligned against him nor his own
suffering, Nixon went on to explain to readers that a smaller proportion
of Catholic voters turned out for him than “any Republican presidential
candidate in history (22 per cent).” Worse for his prospects that year,
“there was not a corresponding and balancing shift of Protestants away
from Kennedy.”

It
may have taken the famously huge and fragile ego of Richard M. Nixon to
imagine himself as a casualty of both religious tolerance and religious
bigotry in the 1960 election, but that seems to have been what he was
driving at. Nixon later made the point in a less veiled form. Kennedy’s
Catholicism only appeared to be a political liability, Nixon wrote in
his 1978 memoir. It actually improved the Massachusetts Senator’s
chances:

The
pockets of fundamentalist anti-Catholic prejudice that still existed
were concentrated in states that I stood to win anyway. But many
Catholics would vote for Kennedy because he was Catholic, and some
non-Catholics would vote for him just to prove they were not bigoted.

A
master at harvesting resentments for electoral advantage, Nixon had
somehow failed to turn anti-Catholicism into a critical mass of votes in
the 1960 election. Aside from some covert overtures to anti-Catholics,
his strategy seems to have involved subtle references to Kennedy’s Roman
Catholic faith coupled with ecumenical appeals to Catholic Republicans
and liberal Protestants. Shaun Casey, author of The Making of a Catholic President,
notes that a supposedly confidential Nixon campaign memorandum,
indicating that Kennedy’s faith would not be exploited for electoral
gain, was “actually released publicly.” The same style of disingenuity
may have been at work in television speech delivered on the eve of the
election, in which the Vice-President urged voters to vote for the best
candidate no matter what their religious affiliation.

One
reasonable conclusion to be drawn from Nixon’s frustration regarding
the “religious issue” in the 1960 election was that anti-Catholicism was
such a doddering, parochial prejudice by this point in American history
that even Nixon (the man whose own White House Counsel would later outline a plan
to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political
enemies.”) dared not put it to explicit use. The fear that it would
provoke a fierce reaction among Catholics, as well as sympathetic
Protestants and Jews, was well-founded. Moreover, Kennedy and his team
adeptly refuted charges that the Pope would take up residence in a
JFK-White House, simultaneously co-signing bills and issuing encyclicals
to Protestants. The result was that the Nixon camp was not able to
successfully evoke the gaunt, withered specter of Vatican political
power.

Then
again, we don’t have to buy Nixon’s full self-pitying narrative to
appreciate that he hit on something approaching truth when he portrayed
himself as a victim of both Catholic preference for a fellow Catholic and
the public’s aversion to the appearance of bigotry. Indeed, Nixon may
have stumbled upon a fundamental paradox in the history of modern
American thought, which accommodates certain expressions of group
identity, while labeling the rest as mere chauvinism. There was no
shortage of prejudice in 1960 (religious and otherwise), but what Nixon
may have been describing was the tipping of electoral scales toward the
flawed liberal dogma of pluralism, which has so far proven superior to
all of the alternatives.

2 comments:

Or maybe Nixon was just engaging in post-defeat rationalization. He lost Georgia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, and Arkansas in 1960. Wouldn"t these be "states containing the pockets of fundamentalist anti-Catholic prejudice that still existed" that he could possibly have won? Al Smith lost West Virginia and North Carolina in 1928.

Glad this comment reminded me to revive this post, because I, too, found it fascinating. I've just read through RMN's Memoirs, and more even than his post-defeat rationalization, this suggests to me his incredible paranoia. No matter what happened, there were Enemies Waiting To Get Him. And he defined them all as a members of some un-American "group" he could find a patriotic reason to hate.